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PayPal Says It’s a ‘Little Early’ To Embrace Bitcoin (With Its 125,000% Gains)

Esther Kim | May 10, 2019 | 13:00

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PayPal CFO John Rainey says it is “too early” for the company to invest in Bitcoin – despite the fact the cryptocurrency has appreciated 125,000 percent in 7 years.

PayPal: We Love Blockchain

Speaking in an interview with Yahoo! Finance this week, John Rainey said that the merchant experience of accepting Bitcoin payments was suboptimal due to market volatility.

While PayPal would continue monitoring the landscape, at present, it was “blockchain not Bitcoin,” which excited executives.

“What we saw because of the instability of the currency – the fact that there was so much volatility from one day to the next – if a merchant accepted that, they would quickly convert it into a more stable currency like the euro or US dollar,” he said.

And so there wasn’t a lot of appetite for that… We have teams working on blockchain and cryptocurrency as well, and we want to take part in that in whatever form that takes in the future – I just think it’s a little early on right now.

Shocker: PayPal Not a Fan of Tech That Makes It Irrelevant

The comments, while nothing new from a legacy financial business operating as a fiat market intermediary, nonetheless is increasingly out of touch with reality in 2019.

As Bitcoinist continues to report, Bitcoin price 00 is undergoing a fresh renaissance this year, delighting investors and analysts who have become increasingly certain its bottom occurred at just above $3000.

While firms like PayPal continue to drag their feet, Bitcoin is outperforming commodities, stocks, and gold so far in 2019. Since 2012, performance has reached almost 125,000 percent.

With predictions now calling for a new all-time high next year, the concept of it being ‘too early’ to ingratiate a business with the Bitcoin sector seems to be a misnomer.

On Blockchain, however, PayPal has held an opposing view and remains committed.

Facebook’s Crypto ‘PayPal Mafia’

Nonetheless, even within that sector, the payment processor faces competition from more crypto-centric developments.

This week, Bloomberg reported on how PayPal executives were migrating to Facebook in order to work on the social media giant’s rumored stablecoin, ‘FB Coin,’ and cryptocurrency payments ecosystem.

Likely to be dubbed ‘Libra,’ the project forms a focus for Facebook’s Blockchain division, with a source telling the publication that 20 percent of employees had originated from PayPal.

The situation echoes that of the early 2000s, when now well-known cryptocurrency figures worked at the first incarnation of PayPal when its digital payments sphere was a novelty in itself.

Those names included Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the latter becoming an especially vocal Bitcoin believer.

As Bitcoinist noted, however, PayPal is not alone in its hesitation on Bitcoin, with Wall Street giants increasingly at risk of missing out on its crucial growth phase. 

What do you think about PayPal’s perspective on Bitcoin? Let us know in the comments below!

Images via Shutterstock